Posted
by
Soulskillon Saturday May 17, 2014 @08:23AM
from the rule-#1:-cardio dept.

mpicpp sends this news from CNN: "Never fear the night of the living dead — the Pentagon has got you covered. From responses to natural disasters to a catastrophic attack on the homeland, the U.S. military has a plan of action ready to go if either incident occurs. It has also devised an elaborate plan should a zombie apocalypse befall the country, according to a Defense Department document obtained by CNN. In an unclassified document titled 'CONOP 8888,' officials from U.S. Strategic Command used the specter of a planet-wide attack by the walking dead as a training template for how to plan for real-life, large-scale operations, emergencies and catastrophes."

The Zombie apocalypse, although implausible, is so viscerally terrifying because it is only an exaggeration of realistic threats. A super-virulent form of rabies is theoretically possible.

I suspect the sensationalism is probably getting in the way of the exercise being a truly productive use of time and resources, but if they're ready for a Zombie apocalypse, it stands to reason that they're ready for more realistic variations on the theme.

if they're ready for a Zombie apocalypse, it stands to reason that they're ready for more realistic variations on the theme.

Sure we may be ready for a zombie apocalypse, but are we prepared for the poor plotting, derivative story-line, cheap jump-scares, wooden acting, gratuitous sex scenes, and corny self-referential jokes of the inevitable sequel?

This, a zombie apocalypse is a very possible threat given the right mutations.

But more to the point, a zombie apocalypse is a great way to prepare for literally the worst kind of scenarios in regards to societal collapse, one that is virulent and deadly.Dealing with a zombie apocalypse helps you identify infection vectors (biological attacks), physical violence (general chaos), secure installations (brute force attack) and many others.It really is a good way to round up very real scenarios in to one heading

I'm glad to see that even the ACs around here see the benefit of this. I read enough of the article (really) to get a pretty good feel, and wondered if/.ers were going to trash or praise the idea. As a training tool, it is pretty useful, more practical ways than it might seem at first glance, as it is fun enough to keep people's attention when being trained.

And yes, there are some real life parallels to zombies, like the AC said, or rapidly spreading infectious disease. Interesting stuff.

Yeah. When I was typing it out, I honestly wasn't sure if I was going for tongue-in-cheek insightful or just dark funny. We'll see how the moderation goes. Although I suspect my "sorry I just woke up" typo will come in to play here.

For those not reading the article, this is not a serious defense plan. The document is for training, zombies could be replaced with another scenerio and the students would still have to think there way through the same logic and set of problems. The zombie spin is a matter of cultural relevancy and thinking out of the box for a scenario.

"The document is identified as a training tool used in an in-house training exercise where students learn about the basic concepts of military plans and order development th

Seems like the only purpose of this article on CNN was to generate page views by people who were fooled by the headline and summary into believing that it actually was meant to be in preparation for a zombie attack. It seems to have worked really well. The purpose of it on/. I don't understand.

I hang around in survivalists circles a little bit and there's a little bit of a saying there "If you can survive a zombie apocalypse you can survive almost anything" The idea of walking undead creatures with a taste for human flesh is very unlikely (not impossible, but unlikely), but the skills & tools for surviving one will prepare you for a variety of situations (natural disaster, civil unrest, economic collapse, etc). The idea of the military preparing for mass numbers of "zombies" (civilians) rising up and assaulting them is not very settling. There are not many situations in which this kind of training would be necessary except for a civilian uprising, save for some of the aspects of dealing with an defending from assault with limited resources, a breakdown of communications & no backup.

Last couple years forced me to rethink a few things. I live in the suburbs of a moderate sized city, but have several hundred acres of farmland a couple hundred miles south with a place to stay, well water, septic system, small wind turbine, solar cells, and 100 acres of woods with a wood burning furnace + stove. Have the wind turbine and solar cells because I'm only down there about 1 month a year to look over the farming operations (we rent it out). So we sell most the electricity we generate back to t

If civilization collapses a few rounds of ammo won't do you any good. Furthermore going alone is the worst plan ever. Band of marauders desperate for food would eventually over run you in no time. The closest thing we have for a guide was the medieval period in which fortified city states were created. Kind of like in Mad Max but each settlement would be substantially larger, in order to assemble a substantive defense force.

Bands of marauders would have to find an isolated place in order to overrun it (the solar panels are probably fine, but the wind turbine and wood stove might attract people from afar). Nobody's going to travel hundreds of miles into the middle of nowhere in the hopes of finding supplies. Most of the rounds he's hoarding can be used for hunting, too.

In the medieval period, repelling multiple armed attackers required architectural defenses and a similar number of trained fighters. That hasn't really been the

Thousands of rounds of ammunition is a little more than "a few rounds". Its true that you're not going to stop a large, determined band of marauders with a a few firearms. However early on most marauder groups are probably going to be poorly organized rabbles looking for easy prey, they're going to turn and run after they watch a few of their number get softball size chunks blown out of them by 7.62 x 54r. Later on you're probably going to have to form larger communities to protect from the now larger

Just remember that as ammo ages it can fail to fire, or delayed fire of sufficient time to allow you to curiously peek into the barrel to see what's wrong. Point being you'll need to eventually restock your ammo, depending on the level of reliability you require.

Rifle ammo can last a LONG TIME assuming it is stored correctly. I shoot surplus ammo through my 7.62 x 51 (308) pretty often that from what I understand is German ammo from the 50s-70s and I've yet to ever run into a dud round.

The idea of the military preparing for mass numbers of "zombies" (civilians) rising up and assaulting them is not very settling.

*sigh* The military is not preparing for any such thing, the tinfoil worn by many survivalists has worn off on you. The military is conducting a _training exercise_, in which commanders and their staff practice taking high level planning/guidance (CONOP 8888 in this case) and transforming it into plans, taskings, and orders.

There are several precedents in the insect world, several forms of fungus & several small insects use other insects as a form of propagation. Ophiocordyceps unilateralis will infect several species of ants & force them to climb to areas above ant activity so they can spread their spoors and infect more ants. I can't remember what its called but there is another case of an insect laying its egg inside an ant species, then after the egg hatches it begins eating the ant from the inside, eventually wo

Some viral contagions could be so bad that you have to kill at a distance, and stay the f away from the body without super spaceship equipment..A contagion that runs a high fever and huge agitation could turn a block of your neighborhood into a zombie movie scene..Believe it..(PS. They are training to get the soldiers use to the idea of killing their own family when they are going through your city block rounding up 'bad people,' like you are likely.).

I went to read the plan from the link in TFS. It sent me to a document hosted on scribd.com, which required a facebook login to download. So this means that in order to defend ourselves against a zombie attack, we will have to be assimilated so we can even read the plan.

2. (U) Of note, where normal carniverouse zombie commonly groan the word "brains" semi-comprehensibly, VZ's [vegetarian zombies] can be identified by their aversion to humans, affinity for plants and their tendency to semi-comprehensibly groan the word "grains".

Zombies have always been a metaphor for the less-intelligent and technologically underequipped races.

In any sort of US collapse scenario the military will need to exterminate any rioters that threaten the 1% who have been chosen to survive. The military will better armed, more mobile. They will only lack numbers. Should they be surrounded by a pack of "zombies" and their supplies run dry, they face certain doom.

These scenarios are just a way of training for mass scale slaughter of Americans.

"The document is identified as a training tool used in an in-house training exercise where students learn about the basic concepts of military plans and order development through a fictional training scenario,"

"The document is identified as a training tool used in an in-house training exercise where students learn about the basic concepts of military plans and order development through a fictional training scenario,"

Emergency services have been using things like "zombie attacks" for decades. There's a lot of reasons why. One is if a civilian stumbles onto your training exercise, they're more likely to think it's some sort of movie then to get scared. Another is it's a bit lighthearted for a serious subject and may make it more enjoyable for people involved. And, any skills or experienced from the fantasy directly carries over to real life situations.

Emergency services have been using things like "zombie attacks" for decades. There's a lot of reasons why. One is if a civilian stumbles onto your training exercise, they're more likely to think it's some sort of movie then to get scared. Another is it's a bit lighthearted for a serious subject and may make it more enjoyable for people involved. And, any skills or experienced from the fantasy directly carries over to real life situations.

"Woah, no way! A tin-foil hat! I've always heard about them, I wonder how it fits..."

Fantasy has already become reality, and that is the main reason we are seeing official government documents coming out now is because the t-virus is more fact than fiction. By releasing these documents, the government is helping train citizens for the zombie outbreak they plan on creating in a few years as a method of population control. Of course, individuals and groups will be targeted for infection to help restore

It's a way to model attacks by [current favorite threat] or [some other threat] without the risk that you'll get caught yet again using training material that's racist or religiously prejudiced or stupidly outdated, avoids the political problems of using training material where the "enemy" is now one of our allies (like the Germans or Russians or in some decades, Iraqis), and eliminates the problem that the training-material enemy is some national or ethnic group that some of your soldiers happen to belong

Zombie attack is used as great training because it combines many different types of scenarios into one. It's an infectious disease, so you're training mass prophylaxis etc, people get injured, so it covers mass casualties like a plane crash or big explosion, the zombies come after people in mass like a riot or invasion. The water is assumed to be infected with the zombie virus, so it trains infrastructure disaster, etc. Nearly everybody involved with emergency response has to do their job for a zombie scenario, so it's great for a large, coordinated training exercise.

The last time we ran zombies, here in College Station, I don't know that the computer emergency response people were included. That's the only group not trained by zombie that I can think of. Maybe next time we'lldo zombie hackers.:)I work at TEEX in College Station, where we train all sorts of peoplefor every disaster imaginable - we have wrecked trains, buildings that collapse on demand, etc. Most of the classes we offer can probably be included in a zombie scenario .

If you read the second link to the actual document. The very beginning is a disclaimer that basically states they used this scenario specifically to add interest to an otherwise dry subject.It doesn't change the subject, nor the training. It merely adds a little 'fun' to the course.As other posters noted. The survival techniques are still valid. The Zombie angle just to make it interesting. And most people will retain more from an interesting class than a dull one.The headline is clickbait.If they were sayi

In the mid 1800's artificial satellites were only science fiction too. As was robotics in the mid 1900's. Now all the global telecommunication depends on satellites and robots are faster and stronger than humans, even if they do not have cognitive capabilities comparable to ours yet.To have a plan is the simplest form of preparation. It's not like they have extra infrastructure or personal around the clock to stop something like a zombie infestation from happening, but they have a plan. And they will spend

Actually it doesn't. Maybe it did in the 70's, 80's, and 90's, but at about the turn of the millennium satellite communication is increasingly unimportant for global communications. In fact it has the disadvantages of much higher latency, lower bandwidth, and much higher cost.

Zombies are a metaphor for poor people. You can't make a battle plan for what to do when the proletariat rises, because the optics are bad, but you can plan for zombies. Yet another reason to do something about income inequality before it comes to that.

P.S.=> What you said actually IS scary, i.e. - substituting "zombies" as a word for a revolt of the working class masses (who've been ROYALLY FUCKED OVER by the TRUE controllers of our now VERY fascist government bought off & PAID for by BRIBERY (lobbyists))

I suppose you can say that "We have the BEST GOVERNMENT that money TRULY CAN buy" or rather, buy

Money buys government. Our votes are symbolic; ignoring the cheating games keeping people distracted, it's a choice between a flavor of corruption.

One is faster than the other but it depends on the flavor in what way. Some issues 1 side can do faster on the guise of compromise and something extremely unpopular just causes a switch out later and a different set of things can be done until revisiting it again--- after voters forget... they only have about a 1 year memory and on big issues you only need to w

What you said doesn't even make sense. Votes are what elects representatives. You have a vote. If you are like most people, you don't vote in the primary election, which is the _only_ time that your vote has any hope of making a difference most of the time. And if you are like most people, you probably routinely vote against your self-interest, because people with a lot of money have used propaganda techniques on you, and you don't know enough to realize you've been snookered. I mean, I hope you'r

No, he's saying that you can choose between the guy who's going to take your right to know what's in your food because money, or the guy who's going to take your right to know what's in your food. Because money.

Y'all have a de facto two-party system. That means that neither party has any reason to make drastic changes to their intended policy. They just have to slag the opponent, and 4-12 years later they've got the presidency again. Why bother listening to people?

Right. That's why you have to vote in the primary and ideally be active in the primary. Because if we keep not voting in primaries, and not paying attention to who's running, we're going to keep getting two bad choices. The two bad choices don't just come out of nowhere, you know.

DFL primaries seem to function but the GOP ones are largely rigged. I have also observed primary cheating (and it's legal.)

Say you get your honest candidate in or your 3rd party person gets into 1 of the two parties. If your person gets to run, then you have not only the other side and likely the press against them (because the press defends the established parties) but you have some of their own party working against them; especially the corrupt elements of their own party.

I wish I were. I don't know that that's actually what's motivating this, and I certainly hope it's not. But the idea of zombies as an unsubtle metaphor for the proletariat is well trodden and more plausible than I would prefer. Of course, they also make for really good fiction. I recommend Mira Grant's Newsflesh series, and Carrie Ryan's The Forest Of Hands And Teeth, both of which have some genuinely hair-raisingly scary bits that made my hands sweat.

The US military takes an oath that holds the Constitution above the president. And they understand what that means, Plus every totalitarian state for the past century has been left-wing, while the military is mostly right-wing, so I don't see them supporting any dictator wannabe in any case.

Pinochet was left-wing? The Shah of Iran was left-wing? Saudi Arabia is left-wing? Putin is left-wing? Anyway, "left-wing" is a really stupid concept to mix with "totalitarian," because most of the supposedly left-wing states you refer to were left-wing in name only. Like, I bet you think Stalin's USSR was left-wing, and that China is left-wing, and North Korea is left-wing. But of course they are not.

Well, you make a good point, I was thinking "dictators of the western world" where the concepts of left and right are familiar. But yeah, Stalin and Hitler (and Mao) were clearly communist and socialist (and communist), respectively. People like to claim "in name only" but really, the core left ideals only work through ever-increasing government coercion, so totalitarianism is an inevitable part of the package (and these guys achieved many of the stated goals of their political philosophies, especially Hi

Seriously? Hitler was a socialist? No, the term "socialism" was co-opted by the Nazis to create a right-wing alternative to actual socialism, which was ascendant at the time. There is nothing remotely socialist about Nazism. E.g., Nazism was very much pro-private-property, and anti-equality.

No, really, don't let the revisionists fool you. Hitler was a socialist, and a progressive. He enacted most of the progressive agenda at the time, and was the first in Europe to do a lot of things. Minimum wage, universal health care, social security, high corporate tax rates, the list goes on quite a bit more. And again most of his reforms were "first time in the Western World" stuff - much of the genuine progress of the 20th century happened first in Germany in the 30s (along with many of the mistakes

Er, no, universal health care was put into place by Bismarck as a means for controlling disease, not out of a desire to promote socialism. Hitler tried to abolish it, but this was so strongly opposed that he gave up. I think you have been reading to much anti-obamacare propaganda—apparently the idea that Hitler is the father of socialized medicine has been floated in a desperate attempt to make Obamacare look bad. But it's completely ahistorical. As are the other points you mentioned—all

Sure, sure, keep telling yourself that Hitler wasn't a socialist, it's always perfectly safe to keep giving the central government more power because corporation koch brother global warming. And hey, if more central power didn't solve the problem, clearly you didn't go far enough. I can see no flaws in this plan.

Actually, it's probably the reverse. The transformation of the Roman army from a drafted landholding class to paid professional soldiers was one of the factors in the collapse of the Roman Republic. People who don't feel a strong connection to established society won't balk at overthrowing it.

That, or there are some very top secret biological weapons at some secret lab in Area 51 or somewhere. And since the higher-ups in government know about this weapon, and what would happen if it were to escape, they practice for such an eventuality.

It's a place holder. The CDC has used it as well to simulate the rapid spread of a disease across the country. You see, in any large scale disaster/emergency/attack/whatever, there are quite a few constants: quarantining or blocking off certain areas, logistics, crowd control, evacuations. A "zombie attack" is essentially a placeholder that allows for plans to be drawn up that can be adapted to a wide range of cases. It also keeps those involved entertained and therefore engaged in the exercise because

First off: training, as others have said. Ridiculous scenarios have the advantage of being more entertaining and less likely to freak out the populace.

And secondly, if you'll allow me to put on my tinfoil hat for a moment, I imagine the response to a worldwide zombie attack would bear many similarities to the response to mass civilian uprisings - a scenario any power-loving government is afraid of. And can you imagine the reactions if it got out that they had a plan titled "Military response to attempted popular revolution"?

Not to mention that you don't want to encourage the god-and-country loving rank and file to think about how they would react to being ordered to fire on their neighbors - in a crisis situation you can put a lot of psychological pressure on the troops and possibly get at least a few days or weeks of unhappy obedience before you have to start worrying about mass defections, which used intelligently may be enough to get the population back in line. Put them through a training exercise where they have to confront the possibility of being used for civilian oppression beforehand though, and you may find that a lot of them have already decided they'll have no part in it if the scenario becomes reality.

And it has the added benefit that anyone claiming that "zombie apocalypse" is a stand-in for "civilian uprising" will sound like they're off their rocker. And so if you'll excuse me I'm going to remove my tinfoil hat and get on with enjying this beautiful Saturday morning.

When I was house shopping, my fiance asked me what me criteria were for choosing a house I told her "Location, Size, Price, Layout, Number of Bedrooms and Defensibility in the event of a Zombie Apocalypse."

Zombie outbreaks are a metaphor for civil unrest. Basically, anything that disrupts food delivery or utilities for a week will be the equivalent of a zombie apocalypse.

Simple. There will never be a zombie attack.On the other hand, being able to train for extreme situations without making the obvious mistake of assigning a real world group as the 'bad guys' because everybody knows zombies don't exist.If they had used a real world opponent, there would be two problems.The first, is the diplomatic problems that would arise from them planning conflicts with that group. How do you think China, or The United Kingdom, or any other country would respond to something like that.Sec

Because a training document based on an invasion by China would be politically embarrasing, and one based on an invasion by North Korea would be legitimizing a megalomaniac. So "zombie" is code for "asian" without having anything embarrassing happen if the game plan is leaked.